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The Dangers of Vaccine Denial

The politics behind the measles vaccine is a hot topic again after a measles outbreak.Credit
Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

IN a few backward parts of the world, extremists resist universal childhood vaccinations. The Taliban in tribal areas of Pakistan. Boko Haram militants in Northern Nigeria.

Oh, yes, one more: Some politicians in the United States.

Senator Rand Paul — a doctor! — told CNBC that he had delayed his own children’s immunizations and cited “many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.”

After an uproar, Paul walked back his remarks and tweeted a photo of himself getting a Hepatitis A vaccination. After that irresponsible scaremongering, I’d say he deserves to get shots daily for a decade. With really long needles.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jerseyweighed in as well, suggesting that vaccinations are partly a matter of family choice — before later seeming to retreat as well. Paul and Christie are Republicans, but public health illiteracy is bipartisan: Vaccination rates are particularly low in some liberal Democratic enclaves in California.

At the Waldorf Early Childhood Center in Santa Monica, Calif., 68 percent of the children had “personal belief exemptions” to avoid vaccination requirements, according to The Hollywood Reporter (the school declined to comment). That suggests that kids in some wealthy areas are as well vaccinated as children in, say, Somalia.

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Can you name the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine? Probably not: Edward Jenner is little known today. He lived roughly when Napoleon did, and (by my back-of-envelope calculations) he managed before he died to save many millions more lives than Napoleon cost in his wars over the same period.

All told, up to the present, Jenner’s vaccine appears to have saved more than half a billion lives since 1800, notes Dr. D.A. Henderson, who led the effort to eradicate smallpox. Jenner should be counted as one of the great heroes of the modern world, yet he is forgotten while everybody knows of Napoleon. That’s emblematic of the way vaccines get short shrift.

In reporting on poverty worldwide, I’ve seen how much vaccines improve human well-being. I understand how troglodytes in the Taliban or Boko Haram can be suspicious of vaccines, but politicians here in affluent, well-educated America? Moms and dads in Santa Monica?

In Britain, for example, researchers found no change in the rate of autism diagnosis after the 1987 introduction of the M.M.R. vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, and M.M.R. vaccination rates were similar for autistic children and for others. Likewise, studies in California and Atlanta found no correlation between autism rates and M.M.R. vaccinations. Japan suspended the M.M.R. vaccine because of health concerns, yet a careful study found that autism continued to rise.

Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, the chairman of the department of preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai medical school, says that there may be environmental factors linked to autism, but these relate to endocrine disrupting chemicals in consumer products, not to vaccines.

“Rather than worry about a vaccine-autism connection that has been proven not to exist, parents should be banding together and writing their elected officials to insist that chemicals be properly tested for toxicity to children before they are allowed to enter the American market,” Dr. Landrigan told me. “The Europeans have passed such legislation. We should, too.”

Yet American parents remain fixated on vaccines in ways that endanger children. According to the World Health Organization, the measles vaccination rate in 2013 stood at 91 percent in the United States — lower than in Zimbabwe or Bangladesh.

Photo

Rylee BeckCredit
Photo courtesy Melissa Beck

Senator Paul and Governor Christie seemed, initially at least, sympathetic to a “personal choice” argument that parents should be allowed to endanger their children in some circumstances. But that’s not the issue here.

The point of immunization isn’t just to protect your own child, but also to protect others. Especially those like Rylee Beck, a 5-year-old girl in Orange, Calif., who is fighting leukemia and can’t be vaccinated. To stay safe, she depends on others getting vaccinated and creating “herd immunity” to keep the disease at bay.

“Rylee is in pre-K, and it’s a scary thing sending her there every day,” her mother, Melissa Beck, told me. In December, the family took Rylee to Disneyland and then was terrified when a measles outbreak infected visitors to the park at that time.

“It just scared us to death,” Melissa Beck said. “We were just holding our breath, hoping nothing was going to come out of it.” Fortunately, Rylee was not infected.

It’s not just cancer patients who can’t be immunized, but also infants, those with vaccine allergies, and people with medical conditions that leave them immunocompromised. And a small proportion of people get the vaccine but never develop immunity, so they, too, depend on others to get vaccinated.

Thus refusing to vaccinate your children is not “personal choice” but public irresponsibility. You no more have the right to risk others by failing to vaccinate than you do by sending your child to school with a hunting knife. Vaccination isn’t a private choice but a civic obligation.

Melissa Beck says that other parents are universally kind and helpful when they see Rylee, frail and sometimes without hair, and learn that she is fighting cancer. She’s sure that other parents aren’t deliberately putting children like Rylee at risk; they just don’t know better.

“It’s a matter of life and death for these kids,” Melissa said. “Maybe that would change these parents’ minds.”